Sleep Between The Stars: InSomnia

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Everyone at RPS suffers from insomnia once in a while, or at least we all spend the early hours of every Tuesday morning clutching bedclothes tightly around our chests, in the grip of a sweat colder than a British summer, wondering if rolling our eyes at Call of Duty is an actual job. It’s natural to assume that a game that goes by the name Insomnia would be a survival horror game about such acts of lonely introspection but the trailer and press release for the first project from Russian studio MONO reveal something entirely different. It’s an online RPG with tactical combat and procedurally generated sandbox elements, set on a generation ship of sorts. The video is a demonstration of the tech and setting rather than an exposition-packed chunk of narrative.

MONO are planning a Kickstarter campaign at the beginning of November but there’s already a fair amount of information at the official site. The setting has claimed my interest at the very least:

The bulk of the action in the game will take place on an enormous, half-deserted space station that has spent more than four centuries travelling to its ultimate destination: the Evacuation Point. Most of the station is abandoned and has come to be known as “the Dump,” but there are also many sectors that have never been explored. The survivors are trying to maintain order within a manned sector called URB-e in the hopes that the station will one day reach its destination.

MONO are keen on mysteries, it seems, with the station’s unexplored areas begging to be discovered and ‘dynamic’ and ‘hidden’ content for players to discover.

I’m naturally cautious as regards the longevity of online games but hopefully the Kickstarter campaign will include enough details to dismiss some of that caution. For now, here’s some information on character advancement because it is wrong to have an entire post about an RPG without any mention of ‘stats’ and ‘classes’.

There is no rigid system of levels or classes in InSomnia. When creating your character, you select Stats that will determine their basic capabilities. Character advancement involves developing Skills and selecting Traits that influence various aspects of the game. Your character’s unique set of skills, traits, and abilities thus forms gradually over time. Advanced characters will have a lot of advantages, but a solid understanding of the game’s mechanics can make it entirely possible, albeit challenging, for a “Noob” to defeat a “Veteran.”

I’d like to perform a ‘find and replace’ function on the entirety of the internet, replacing ‘noob’ with ‘newcomer’.

i’ve only played the first bioshock but if you mean it has pipes in it yes i suppose. But I just thought personally like I was being shown through a remake from parts of Midgar City from FFVII, with a different character walking round.

my co-worker’s aunt makes $75 every hour on the laptop. She has been without a job for 6 months but last month her paycheck was $18068 just working on the laptop for a few hours. you could try this out -=-=-=-link to goo.gl

Very much interested in this game. Also, “wondering if rolling our eyes at Call of Duty is an actual job” is a tell of a great writer. Mr Smith should write a novel consisting entirely of the first sentences taken from his RPS entries. And I could bet it would be an interesting read.

I’d be fine if ‘noob’ were just replaced by ‘newb’. I know people consider newb to be a dated term that has been replaced by noob, but in my opinion there’s a big difference. Noob is the word used by assholes to refer to anyone who they want to piss off, particularly players who use a nonstandard build or strategy, rather than actually poor players. Newb on the other hand is just short for newbie, a new player, and really, aside from the occasional person who just doesn’t give a damn, bad players are mostly only bad because they haven’t yet played enough…or I guess they might have a disability.

might have a disability! A bit harsh. . . I’ve played loads of football over my years doesn’t mean I am any good at it, I have certainly played enough at alot of games too, some i’m better at than others. is there a chance some people just aren’t very good at some things or does there have to be a reason?

When you played all that football did anybody get pissed off at you for not being really good? I didn’t mean to say that everyone is capable of getting up to pro levels at DOTA, but anyone without some sort of impairment will be good enough not to drag their team down in non-tournament play, so long as their team hasn’t played far more than them or much more seriously. So, shouting at someone for being a noob is stupid – with the one and only exception of if someone claims to be a great player when they aren’t.

I didn’t mean to say that you’re disabled if you aren’t great at a game, I just meant to point out that people with disabilities do play games sometimes, and for instance, someone whose reaction time is half what most of us have, will need to play twice as long as someone else to be able to compete with them.

Sure people get annoyed at me at football, People got annoyed with better players when they messed up too. Whats the point there?
I don’t play many “team” multiplayer games so perhaps i’m misunderstanding where your coming from and I dont play DOTA. But if your reaction time is half mine and we see each other at the same time you will shoot me first everytime. No matter if I have played twice as much as you or five times as much. Doesn’t make me any more of a newbe/noob/newb than you or anyone, unless it is like the first time i am playing and dont now what i am doing.

True, but even a more directly associable game such as counter-strike has much more going on than just reflexes. In a game such as DOTA a player with slower reflexes will be at a disadvantage, but still very capable of playing well; just not as well as a pro.
Really, all I’m trying to say is the word “noob” is stupid. Nobody wants to be bad at a game and it’s almost never a random person on the internet’s fault he’s playing poorly in whatever game he’s playing. So trying to shame people for being bad is just dumb.